The Art of Fielding
A Novel
Chad Harbach
Little, Brown: 528 pp., $25.99
In terms of conjuring a shorthand for a certain American innocence, there are few delivery systems quite so direct as baseball. Touched on by a library's worth of authors...

Will Ferrell moderates his typical screen persona quite well to play a man whose life has collapsed around him on just about every possible count. While fighting inner demons, he's fired, his wife leaves him, and he's banished from his home - leaving...

“Everything Must Go” — A “great” Will Ferrell comedy? Timely, about a guy who has just lost his job, his wife and his place to live. A bleak Raymond Carver story about an alcoholic that works because it cast the shockingly empathe

For much of the 1980s, beginning when I was in college, I used to read a Hemingway book a year. The point was not self-improvement but rather a kind of exploration: What was it, exactly, about his writing that I'd missed? I had read "The Sun Also Rises" in high school and had admired its spare portrayal of 1920s expatriate life. But I'd also thought of it as more than a little stilted, even melodramatic in its way.
Of all the great American between-the-wars writers — "the three kings," as Richard...

Raymond Carver Photos

I'm a sucker for a good tagline. Four or five carefully chosen words can convert me from “maybe, if I'm bored” to “definitely, opening weekend!” Sometimes I'm disappointed. Other times, I'm fulfilled. The tagline for Everything Must Go,

To Be Sung Underwater
A Novel
Tom McNeal
Little, Brown: 436 pp., $24.99
You can often tell where a musician has trained or with whom a painter has learned technique. In the case of the European masters, art historians looking at a particular work can often trace the lineage to a region, a studio, a teacher.
It is no different for literature — you get a whiff of John McPhee in the descriptive passages here, a bit of Ron Carlson in the mysterious interplay of humans and landscapes there, a...